Showing posts with label Freud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Freud. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
ANALYZE THIS!
For the past several days I have been plowing through Freud's great work, THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, in preparation for my OLLI course on Freud in the Spring. At the same time, each night, I have been having long, complicated, vivid dreams. It is as though some part of my mind is saying to Freud: "O.K. You think you are so smart? Analyze this!" Of course, Robert De Niro I am not.
Friday, July 31, 2009
BOOK REPORT
I have mentioned, I think, that I am now teaching courses in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Duke University, one of fifty or more such learning in retirement institutes funded in part by the Bernard Osher Foundation. [My sister, Dr. Barbara Searle, who lives in Washington, D.C., is a fabulously successful instructor in the Osher program run there, at American University. She teaches courses mostly on evolutionary biology and genetics.] In preparation for a course of lectures I will be giving in six months' time on The Thought of Sigmund Freud, I have started rereading the principal book I shall be assigning, Sigmund Freud, by the disinguished English philosopher Richard Wollheim. The book is now almost forty years old, but it remains the best thing I have read on the subject. For me, the central idea [and yes, it is, I think, a very beautiful idea] is the extraordinary process of reasoning by which Freud arrived at the discovery of the unconscious. I shan't try to summarize it here, simply recommend the book to anyone reading this who has a serious interest in Freud's work.
Forty years ago, when I was living in New York and teaching at Columbia, I attended a session of something called the Theater for Ideas, at which Bruno Bettelheim and several others spoke about Freud's hidden philosophy. The event itself was a hoot -- held in a loft used during the day as a dance studio, and attended by many of the leading lights of the New York intellectual establishment. I sat in the front row between William Schuman and Sidney Hook, and behind me were Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag, among others. Bettelheim, who was a brilliant but thoroughly unpleasant man, gave a fascinating talk, the theme of which was that the centerpiece of Freud's work was an unceasing search for the unconscious. When he finished, Sidney Hook popped up to protest that what Freud had said was not original. "Quite true," Bettleheim responded. "Shakespeare could do what Freud could do -- witness the handwashing compulsion in Macbeth. And Dostoyevsky could do what Freud could do -- witness the anatomy of an Oedipus Complex in The Brothers Karamazov. Shakespeare could do what Freud did, and Dostoyevsky could do what Freud did. But Freud was able to teach us how to do it."
It was, I thought, the most successful put-down I had ever witnessed in an intellectual confrontation. Its impact was somewhat marred by Mailer, who then rose, his chest pushing out his vest like a Bantam fighting cock, and delivered a long, rambling attack on his latest analyst, who had, I gathered, somewhat disappointed Norman.
Those were simpler times.
Forty years ago, when I was living in New York and teaching at Columbia, I attended a session of something called the Theater for Ideas, at which Bruno Bettelheim and several others spoke about Freud's hidden philosophy. The event itself was a hoot -- held in a loft used during the day as a dance studio, and attended by many of the leading lights of the New York intellectual establishment. I sat in the front row between William Schuman and Sidney Hook, and behind me were Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag, among others. Bettelheim, who was a brilliant but thoroughly unpleasant man, gave a fascinating talk, the theme of which was that the centerpiece of Freud's work was an unceasing search for the unconscious. When he finished, Sidney Hook popped up to protest that what Freud had said was not original. "Quite true," Bettleheim responded. "Shakespeare could do what Freud could do -- witness the handwashing compulsion in Macbeth. And Dostoyevsky could do what Freud could do -- witness the anatomy of an Oedipus Complex in The Brothers Karamazov. Shakespeare could do what Freud did, and Dostoyevsky could do what Freud did. But Freud was able to teach us how to do it."
It was, I thought, the most successful put-down I had ever witnessed in an intellectual confrontation. Its impact was somewhat marred by Mailer, who then rose, his chest pushing out his vest like a Bantam fighting cock, and delivered a long, rambling attack on his latest analyst, who had, I gathered, somewhat disappointed Norman.
Those were simpler times.
Friday, July 10, 2009
A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU
Much of my recent trip to Amherst was spent with old friends -- Milton Cantor and Margaret Taylor, Steve Arons, Esther Terry, Mike Thelwell, Bill Strickland, and many more -- as well as a new friend, Ann Davis, who was my student at Columbia forty-one years ago. It was of course wonderful to see these friends, whom I have known for more than two decades. But even more important to me than the affection I feel for them was the reminder they provided of a style of discourse that has all but disappeared from the public world in America today.
I spend endless hours watching television news stations and surfing the web, reading what is written by commentators and bloggers left, right, and center. The overwhelming impression this leaves on me is of an almost universal vulgarisation of the public discourse. Over the past three decades and more, the tone and content of what is said in the public arena has grown progressively more superficial, more ignorant, and meaner spirited. This is especially true on the right, but it extends across all of that narrow band of the political spectrum that makes an appearance in our public life.
The level of sheer ignorance, whether wilfull or unintentional. is staggering -- ignorance of the simplest facts of American social and economic life, ignorance of history, ignorance of literature and the arts, ignorance of elementary science, ignorance of other nations and cultures. Good-looking men and women with perfect hair and teeth and seemingly air-brushed complexions ask stupid questions with an air of self-confidence and self-satisfaction that takes my breath away. When politicians and others say patently ignorant and stupid things, they are almost never challemged or called to account by the interviewers whose smiling, nodding responses suggest that the politicians are making perfectly good sense. On the rare occasions when Barney Frank, for example, appears and speaks simple good sense, he is treated as a comic curmudgeon.
More distressing even than the ignorance is the acceptance of mean-spirited greed-soaked selfishness, which is taken as the moral norm for a person in public life. What matters is not so much whether these vile expressions are counterpoised against others, but that such ugly utterances are considered acceptable in public speech. There have always been callously selfish and unfeeling bigots, heaven knows. But only recently have the likes of Pat Buchanan been considered appropriate commentators on an ostensibly liberal network like MSNBC.
Spending time with my old friends in Amherst reminded me what conversation used to be like when I was young. I do not think this is simply the familiar nostalgia of the old when confronted with the inevitable passage of time. Too may people to whom I have voiced this distress have agreed with me that a real change for the worse has taken place in America's public life. If I may tie it to old movies [always a reliable barometer of the collective mind], compare the negative presentation of the self-interested fat cats played by Edward Arnold in the old films with the glow of attracvtion surrounding Gordon Gecko, played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street.
What to do, other than fulminate? Well, each of us can do no more than light a candle, while still cursing the darkness that remains beyond its flickering light. Over the next two years, I shall strike a very small blow for a more informed understanding of society and the human psyche by teaching a sequence of courses in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, a learning in retirement program at Duke University where I volunteer my time. This coming Fall, I shall teach a course on The Thought of Karl Marx. That will be followed, in each of three subsequent semesters, by courses on the thought of Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim. Perhaps in a small way I can convey the breadth and depth of the insights that earlier generations of social, economic, and psyhcological theorists brought to our understanding of the human condition.
Don't expect any dramatic changes in the world!
I spend endless hours watching television news stations and surfing the web, reading what is written by commentators and bloggers left, right, and center. The overwhelming impression this leaves on me is of an almost universal vulgarisation of the public discourse. Over the past three decades and more, the tone and content of what is said in the public arena has grown progressively more superficial, more ignorant, and meaner spirited. This is especially true on the right, but it extends across all of that narrow band of the political spectrum that makes an appearance in our public life.
The level of sheer ignorance, whether wilfull or unintentional. is staggering -- ignorance of the simplest facts of American social and economic life, ignorance of history, ignorance of literature and the arts, ignorance of elementary science, ignorance of other nations and cultures. Good-looking men and women with perfect hair and teeth and seemingly air-brushed complexions ask stupid questions with an air of self-confidence and self-satisfaction that takes my breath away. When politicians and others say patently ignorant and stupid things, they are almost never challemged or called to account by the interviewers whose smiling, nodding responses suggest that the politicians are making perfectly good sense. On the rare occasions when Barney Frank, for example, appears and speaks simple good sense, he is treated as a comic curmudgeon.
More distressing even than the ignorance is the acceptance of mean-spirited greed-soaked selfishness, which is taken as the moral norm for a person in public life. What matters is not so much whether these vile expressions are counterpoised against others, but that such ugly utterances are considered acceptable in public speech. There have always been callously selfish and unfeeling bigots, heaven knows. But only recently have the likes of Pat Buchanan been considered appropriate commentators on an ostensibly liberal network like MSNBC.
Spending time with my old friends in Amherst reminded me what conversation used to be like when I was young. I do not think this is simply the familiar nostalgia of the old when confronted with the inevitable passage of time. Too may people to whom I have voiced this distress have agreed with me that a real change for the worse has taken place in America's public life. If I may tie it to old movies [always a reliable barometer of the collective mind], compare the negative presentation of the self-interested fat cats played by Edward Arnold in the old films with the glow of attracvtion surrounding Gordon Gecko, played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street.
What to do, other than fulminate? Well, each of us can do no more than light a candle, while still cursing the darkness that remains beyond its flickering light. Over the next two years, I shall strike a very small blow for a more informed understanding of society and the human psyche by teaching a sequence of courses in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, a learning in retirement program at Duke University where I volunteer my time. This coming Fall, I shall teach a course on The Thought of Karl Marx. That will be followed, in each of three subsequent semesters, by courses on the thought of Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim. Perhaps in a small way I can convey the breadth and depth of the insights that earlier generations of social, economic, and psyhcological theorists brought to our understanding of the human condition.
Don't expect any dramatic changes in the world!
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